Thursday, 24 April 2008

Notes from 'Museums and Europeana - the European Digital Library' at MCG's Spring Conference

These are my notes from David Dawson' presentation 'Europeana - Museums and the European Digital Library' at the MCG Spring Conference. There's some background to my notes about the conference in a previous post. If I've made any comments below they're in [square brackets].

The EDL is a political initiative - part of i2010 Eu's IT strategy. It will provide a common point of multilingual access to online 'stuff'. It includes the TEL project (The European Library - catalogue records of national libraries) and MICHAEL.

The Europeana 'maquette' was launched in February, showing how might work in a few years time. 'One or two little issues still need working on'. 'Themes' aren't really being taken forward. It has social tagging (going into faceted browsing [did I get that right?]). Works around who, what, where and when, and includes a timeline. It will have 7 million pieces of content.

Europeana and MICHAEL (multilingual websites/digital collections from cultural heritage sector across Europe).MICHAEL doesn't reach to item level, just collection descriptions. It also relates to collection descriptions in TEL.

Why are service registries needed?Map of where content is and how it is managed.Information Environment Service RegistryMachine to machine services; will know what schemas and terminologies have been used. Interoperability protocols.(Translated subject terminology and screen material into Welsh.)

EDLNet project. Interoperability Working Group.MinervaEC - the Minerva technical guidleines are being revised/updated. The previous guidelines were downloaded 60,000 times in 9 languages - this indicates the appetite for guidelines.

Slide 14 shows the path from institutional databases to national or theme/topic-based portals , from there into the EDL. [The metadata storage diagram on slide 15 is what's currently being built, slide 14 is a year old.]

It will support RDF triples. It will offer simple, advanced and faceted search [faceted search as browsing].

APIs would provide the mechanism to enable many different uses of the metadata. The benefit is then in the underlying services, not just website. [But if we want APIs, we have to ask for them or they might not happen.]

How to promote your content in Europeana?Create your content using open standards. If you are already using the Minerva technical standards, then you should be able to supply your metadata so it they can link into something that will go into Europeana.

You should use your existing metadata standards and prepare to map your data to domain-specific Dublic Core Application Profiles. [Does domain specific mean there won't be one schema for museums, libraries, and archives; but possibly schemas for each? A really usable schema for museum data is the other thing we need to make APIs the truly useful tool they could be, even if different types of museums have slightly different requirements from a schema.]

Terminologies - prepare to take advantage of the semantic web. Publish terminologies and thesauri using SKOS - it's machine readable, can be used by search engines. [Using computers to match ontologies? Semweb FTW! Sorry, got a bit excited.]

Register your content and services with existing registries like TEL and MICHAEL.

Practicalities: in the UK the People's Network Discover Service (PNDS) currently harvests 500,000 digital objects. All MLA funded activity requires participation. Other projects, like Exploring 20th Century London, are using the PNDS infrastructure. The PNDS will contain an estimated 4 million digital objects by [the end of] 2008. It will be integrated into Culture 24 and the Collections Trust Subject Specialist Networks; part of same national infrastructure.

eContentPlus and EDLocal - support for institutions to get metadata into PNDS.

Timetable (slide 20): May 23, project conference launch [ask for information if you want to have your say]; June 4th, launch of Due Diligence Guidelines on Orphan Works [which will be useful for recent discussions about copyright and the cultural heritage sector].

23rd, 24th June - Europeana initial prototype reviewed - call for volunteers?It's important to have museums people at the conference in order to represent museum-specific requirements, including the need for an API. It might be possible to fund museum people to get there.

November 2008: high profile launch.

After May 23rd David will be on the other side of the fence, and his question will be 'how can I get my content into the PNDS, Culture 24, Europeana?'.

QuestionsMike: is the API a must? David: it is for him, for the project managers it might be a maybe. Mike: without an API it will die a death.

Andrew: thanks to David for his work at the MLA (and the MCG). From May 24th [after David leaves], how does the MLA support this work? David: expecting announcment would have been made but as they haven't yet it's difficult to answer that.

Me: how can we as museums advocate or evangelise about the need for an API? David: go to the conference, represent views of institutions.

This session ended with thanks from Debbie and a round of applause for David's contributions to the Museums Computer Group.